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The Soviets were uncharacteristically blunt about the dismissals. In a bulletin read on the evening news program Vremya, the official news agency, TASS, announced that Sokolov had been relieved in "connection with his retirement." TASS went on to report that the Politburo had learned that the plane had been "detected by radars of the antiaircraft defenses when it was approaching the state border of the U.S.S.R. Soviet fighter planes twice flew around the West German plane." But apparently no action was taken, which led the Politburo to conclude that the "antiaircraft-defenses command had shown intolerable unconcern and indecision about cutting short the flight without resorting to combat means. This fact attests to serious shortcomings in organizing the protection of the airspace of the country . . . and major dereliction of duty in the guidance of forces by the Ministry of Defense."
The incident was a stunning and ironic contrast to the September 1983 downing of a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet that had penetrated Soviet airspace. All 269 people aboard the plane were killed when a Soviet fighter blasted the Korean jetliner with a missile near the island of Sakhalin. When reminded by reporters of KAL Flight 007 last week, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov responded angrily, "You criticize us for shooting down a plane, and now you criticize us for not shooting down a plane."
Last week's Red Square landing may have provided Gorbachev with precisely the pretext he needed to oust Sokolov. Western diplomats have speculated for months that Gorbachev wanted to replace the aging minister with a younger, more vigorous man. Said a Western official in Moscow: "The man at the top has to be responsible. That is the military way."
At the center of the furor was the unlikely figure of Rust, a novice pilot who has held a private license for only a year. Friends said the 6-ft.-tall teenager had set out from Hamburg on May 13 on his first long-distance solo flight. Operating a plane rented from Aero Club Hamburg and fitted with extra fuel tanks, Rust filed a flight plan for Reykjavik, Iceland, some 1,300 miles and twelve hours away. He said his goal was to log as quickly as possible the 150 flying hours required for a commercial license.
After leaving Hamburg, Rust flew to the West German island of Sylt in the North Sea, the Shetland Islands off northern Scotland, Reykjavik and eventually on to Helsinki. Officials at Helsinki's Vantaa International Airport reported that Rust took off at 12:21 p.m. last Thursday after filing a flight plan for Stockholm. Air traffic controllers tracked the plane as it headed west. But 20 minutes into the flight, Rust's Cessna turned abruptly southeast, toward the Soviet Union, and then disappeared from Finnish radar screens. Rust was not heard from again until he arrived in Moscow after a flight of some six hours.
What was Rust up to? The Hamburg-based newspaper Bild quoted him as telling Soviet police, "I just wanted to talk with Russians." According to the newspaper, Rust said he had been shadowed by Soviet fighters along the way, and he offered an explanation for his unauthorized route through the Soviet Union: "If I had asked for a regular flight path, I wouldn't have had enough fuel to get to Moscow."